


A Skeleton, A Closet to Keep It In

by embroiderama



Series: Skeleton [1]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Gen, Hurt, Psychological Trauma, Rape, Shock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:52:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/embroiderama/pseuds/embroiderama
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter was picking up dinner. Neal was making copies. Everything changed, and then it didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Skeleton, A Closet to Keep It In

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea why I wrote this. It's not something I would usually write, and I didn't want to write it, but other things refused to be written until this was done. If I were the kind of person to put fic in a drawer, this would be one of those, but if I finish something I have to post it. So. The title is from Ani DiFranco's "Dilate."

It was ironic, Neal thought. Seriously ironic, not Alanis Morissette ironic, and he thought that maybe his sense of irony was the thing keeping him from screaming as pain and shame pounded through his body in sickening waves. He made it through four years of federal prison. Four years and then three more months, and he kept his eyes open and he made himself useful and he had people who would watch his back. Four years and then three more months with nothing more than threats and a few bruises.

Four years and then three more months without ever having his pants pulled down, his ribs bruised and the breath forced out of his body by every impact with the hard plastic edge of the copier machine, his head spinning, ears ringing from whatever hit him in the head before the whole nightmare started.

And it was late and there was nobody else working on their floor. Wasn't supposed to be anybody on their floor other than Neal, while Peter was downstairs meeting the Chinese food delivery person. So it was ironic, Neal thought, that he's survived four years and three months in federal prison only to be raped in the White Collar office of the FBI building by a man whose face he'd never seen. And it was absurd that Peter was downstairs collecting pork dumplings and shrimp fried rice and soup while somebody who almost certainly wore an FBI badge was ripping Neal apart from inside. Inside his ass, inside his mind.

And then he was out, with a final ripping pain, and with no words he was gone. Neal's knees hurt, and he realized he'd fallen to the floor, his bare knees hitting the thin industrial carpet over concrete. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to crawl into the corner and close his eyes and try to disappear for a while, just a little while, but then he heard the ding of the elevator. And that meant Peter, probably Peter, and Peter could never see him like this, on his knees on the floor with his ass bare. Ruined.

Biting down on his lip, Neal forced himself to stand. The room swam around him, but he pulled up his pants, tucked in his shirt, fastened his belt just in time as Peter came around the corner with a plastic bag full of Chinese food.

"Is it jamming again?" Peter asked. Neal tried to figure out what he was talking about, and after a moment Peter added, "The copier?"

"Oh. Yeah, sorry."

Then Peter put the bag of food down on the floor and walked closer. He walked into the copier room, and Neal froze. He hadn't had time to make sure there was no evidence, hadn't had time to straighten the pages that had been crumpled in his grasping hands. "What happened?" Peter asked, his face almost angry.

Neal swallowed hard against the spasming of tears or vomit or screams that he felt welling up in his throat. "Nothing."

"You're bleeding," Peter said gently as he reached toward Neal's forehead.

Neal winced and lifted his hand to cover the spot where his forehead had hit the upraised lid of the copier after he was hit from behind. He felt a tiny amount of blood, just a scratch. "I tripped," he said. "Bumped my head, I guess. I didn't realize it."

"Neal, _what happened_? Did you get a phone call?"

Neal's heart raced, but he looked around and there was no sign, no obvious evidence of anything other than a jam in the copier. "What do you mean?"

"Your _face_. You look like--" Peter shook his head, looking ridiculously worried. "I don't know."

Neal forced himself to smile, that con-man's grin he could flip on like a fedora. "I don't know either. I'm fine."

"You're not. I don't know why you're lying, but you're _anything_ other than fine."

"Aren't we supposed to have dinner? I'm just going to wash up." Neal pushed past Peter and almost tripped over the bag of food. Clumsy. Stupid and clumsy. He made it to the men's room and flipped the lock because nobody was coming in there with him. Not Peter. Not anybody else. Anybody else.

He stood at a sink and looked at himself in the mirror, and there was something wrong with his face, other than the small trickle of drying blood near his hairline. He couldn't figure out what it was; he hadn't been hit in the face, hadn't even been looked in the face. But what he saw in the mirror wasn't his face, not quite. Nonetheless it smiled grotesquely when he moved his facial muscles, and when he held a wet paper towel to his forehead the blood in the mirror disappeared.

Neal stared at his wrong face until the room swayed suddenly, and he caught himself on the wall until the room was steady. He had to go out, had to finish things with Peter, had to get home where he could get clean and get his right face on and figure out how he was going to make this go away. He straightened his tie and tried to fix his hair and walked back into the White Collar office to find Peter setting up the Chinese food at an empty desk, trying to act like he wasn't tracking Neal like an animal.

Neal sat down, tried to school the shock of pain off of his face. He picked up his container of food, opened it, and was immediately certain that he could not eat. At all. But Peter was watching him with his concern and his suspicion so Neal put a shrimp in his mouth and held it there. He couldn't swallow and he couldn't spit it out, and wasn't that just his whole life right there? He had choices but none of them were good. None of them even seemed possible.

"Neal." Peter's voice, insistent but gentle, startled him, and he opened his eyes.

He wasn't sure when he'd closed them, and the shrimp was still in his mouth. He swallowed it hard, locked down his throat against throwing it up, and when he looked up again Peter was there. Just suddenly there in Neal's space the way the faceless man had been, and Neal pulled back, his chair wheeling across the carpet.

"Whoa." Peter held up his hands--empty, defenseless. "Will you please tell me what's going on? I was gone for ten minutes, and there was nobody else here."

Neal froze, and Peter's eyes narrowed.

"Or maybe there was." Peter stared at Neal, his gaze moving over Neal's body, cataloging him like a crime scene. He moved in closer, reaching out toward Neal's head. Neal started to scoot further away, and Peter froze. "I can't let this go," he said quietly. "Whatever you don't want to tell me, I cannot let this go. There's blood in your hair, on the back of your head, and you didn't get that from tripping and bumping your head on the copier."

Neal tried to hold himself still as he jerked at the memory of the pain, the impact to his head that had started the whole thing. The element of surprise. Shock and awe.

"At the very least, you're concussed. I'm taking you to the hospital."

"I can't do that." He had to get home. He had to figure out how to make this not have happened. He couldn't do that in the hospital.

"It's not optional." Nothing was optional. "Come on." Peter put his hand lightly on Neal's arm. "Stand up."

There were no choices, so Neal stood and held himself stiff against the pain in his body and the dip and sway of the room.

"Is that--" Peter whispered. "Neal there's blood. On your chair." He was holding onto Neal then, his hands on Neal's shoulders, and Neal could feel the pressure there but he was watching it at the same time, watching it from off to the side like Peter was solving somebody else's case, Peter was figuring it out. The smartest guy in the room.

Peter blinked and then then blinked again and spoke slowly. "Can you walk with me to the car?"

Neal nodded because yes, he could do that. They could walk to the car and then go home. They walked to the elevator, and Peter was on the phone saying something about security tapes and ERT, and Neal couldn't remember what case he was talking about. They got in the car but then instead of June's house they pulled up to the emergency room.

Neal didn't have any choices, but he wasn't getting out of the car. He wasn't entirely sure why, but he knew without question that he couldn't get out of the car. Peter opened his door and crouched down. "I wish you'd talk to me," he said. "I don't understand how, but I'm pretty sure something terrible happened to you just a little earlier. Am I wrong?"

The crash against his head, the rattle of his buckle, the tug of his pants going down, hands on his hips and pain inside him, inside him, inside him. He couldn't say that Peter was wrong. "Four years," he said, his voice sounding as wrong as his face had looked. Not his own voice, even though his lips were moving. "And three more months. And never. Never."

"Oh Jesus Christ," Peter said, and his face was wrong too. "I'm sorry. Goddamn it, I'm sorry." Peter looked down for a moment then looked up with his wrong face. "Will you please come inside with me?"

"It's not really a choice is it?"

Peter didn't answer. He just stood and put his hand on Neal's arm again. Neal stood up out of the car, swallowing back the pain in the middle of his body, and then there was a wheelchair and a woman in scrubs. He closed his eyes and wished that he would just pass out, but he didn't. He kept his eyes closed and if anybody knew he was awake they let him pretend.

What he could see behind his eyes were four options, four directions on a map. He could go back to prison; whether he convinced Peter or he did something to make the Marshals send him back, he could return to the place where he'd been relatively safe and serve out the rest of his sentence in a place where he'd never forget to keep his guard up. He could run, cut his anklet and run and never stop running for the rest of his life, never see Peter or Elizabeth or June or anybody else he'd come to care about.

He could die, and that would take care of everything, but even then, even floating in the sick grey nowhere inside his head, he didn't want death. And finally, he could stay, keep working for the FBI, spend every working day inside a building with hundreds of men in suits. He'd have to do it knowing that one of them, one of the agents he smiled at deferentially, one of the men he passed in the hallway or met in the elevator had decided, had meticulously planned, had _raped_ him.

A world of choices, none of them good. No options.

The world went away for real then, and when Neal woke up everything was white and soft around the edges.

"Neal?"

At the sound of Peter's voice, Peter's wrong voice, Neal remembered everything. He closed his eyes and talked to the hazy wrong-faced Peter he could remember from before. Before whatever. "Did you find out who it was?"

Peter was silent, only the sound of his feet shifting on the floor betraying him.

"Please, Peter. Be honest with me."

Peter sighed, long, tense and controlled. "The cameras and security logs were tampered with. And there was no--" Audible inhale, heavy exhale. "Physical evidence. But we will figure it out."

"Right." Neal didn't want to make Peter look him in the eye, and he curled his arm over his face just to make sure. Peter was no con man, and not even Neal was good enough to convince himself that anything would be okay. "Do I have to stay here tonight?"

"They had to give you some--" Shuffling feet again. "Some stitches, but you can go home in the morning probably. And I swear I will find a way to make this right, and I will get you all the help you need."

Neal snorted, but then reeled himself back in because if he laughed he wouldn't be able to stop crying. He let the cold in his middle expand and cover everything else. "This is what we're going to do: this didn't happen."

"Neal," Peter started, his voice full of meaning and intent.

"It didn't happen. I won't talk about it, ever. The only thing you can do for me here is to not mention it, ever. It didn't happen, that's the only way."

"You can't make this decision right now."

"I can't make any _other_ decision." Neal wanted to sit up, take his arm away from his eyes, but he couldn't look at Peter and have this discussion. "You've thought of all the options here, same as I have, and none of them are okay with me. None of them."

"Neal," Peter said again, and then his hand was on Neal's arm, touching gently.

"Don't. Touch me." Neal held himself stone-still to keep from jerking away until finally Peter pulled his hand back. "I'll be at work Monday morning. And I'll be fine. And this didn't happen."

Peter was silent, no shifting feet, no words, just the sound of his breathing.

"Go home," Neal said, and he was proud that it didn't sound like a plea.

Peter sighed. "I'm going to follow your lead on this, but if you change your mind--"

"You'll know. If I change my mind you'll know."

"I imagine I will." Peter sounded resigned and sad, and Neal wanted to punch him in the face. "I'll see you Monday." Neal was sure he was supposed to hear sixteen different layers of caring and support and anger and doubt in those four words, but the only thing that had meaning to him was that he was going to be alone.

He listened to the sound of Peter leaving the room, the sound of the door opening and closing. He curled onto his side, pressed his face into the pillow and cried until his head hurt and his stomach hurt and his ribs hummed with pain, and when he was done he rolled over and opened his eyes to stare up at the blank white ceiling while his eyes dried.

There weren't going to be any more tears because it didn't happen. Nothing happened. Nothing at all.


End file.
